Category: Death
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Temporal
Perhaps the problem is one of time… Yes, I am influenced by finally (i.e., at a later point in time than anticipated within the implied framework of some unspecified but apparently familiar system of planning) seeing Arrival. But also wandering through spaces of analysis, self-reflection, mild illness, trying to get some writing done. Late, of course. Time…
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What is it to…
What is it to 'go on', to 'leave behind', to 'finish with'? I don't quite mean moving on to doing something else, which is often coloured with the anticipation and energy of whatever it is that is new. ••• Over the past few weeks, my cable company has been running episodes of The Closer back…
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Negative capability
Analysis, a couple of weeks ago. For some months, I rarely bring dreams in: I know that I am dreaming but can't remember anything. The previous week's single dream: a teenager who was stubborn, wouldn't speak, was angry at everything: the adults talk around him, being social and polite, but he throws off all our timing, our…
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Cracks in the world
A strange and fragmented time. It feels like a distant echo of the 1930s: erosion, disintegration of supports and safety. Feral rage, roving attacks. A distant whiff of rot and gunpowder. Milder, of course, by far – at least at this point in history: that weird sense that, with a massacre of innocents at a Florida gay bar,…
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Easter
On the one hand, longer days, sunlight, a still-chilly and intermittent promise of spring. On the other HCV medications, confusions, changing demands, papers to write – Behind it all is still a greater calm, dreams that tend to move through anxiety to relief and resolution. Not an imagined change, clearly a real one… But no,…
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Shadows
… I don't feel well…. ••• Bits of news and experiences, some silly, some exasperating, exhausting. Some vaguely foreboding. I've mentioned my own error from late spring and summer, in taking charcoal capsules for stomach problems – which led to medications not being absorbed – which is now turning into a chain of events that has…
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It’s complicated
A complicated time. The Book, the one I had all those bizarre death dreams about, arrived in my office TODAY. And yet I breathe. Too much to do in the past weeks, some of it distinctly though not disastrously late… Merrie and I performed duets on my students' musicals night. We made blunders but it…
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Of Pratchett
Terry Pratchett has died… media are stating it quite carefully; it seems possible, given that he valued the right to die, that it could have been a voluntary act in the face of early-onset Alzheimer's, rather than any kind of medical inevitability. Which is absolutely his decision – I don't, myself, feel there is any…
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To Züri
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by
A busy, rapidly moving ten days or so, resulting in numerous things done – patients, classes, editing, emails – and also at some points just stopping, almost startled that I didn't want to work on the next thing. My new version of procrastination, I think: something barer, simpler – with far less anxiety. Perhaps this…
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Men in autumn • fragments • a flash
I haven’t written here for a while… somewhat preoccupied, fairly busy. Walking through what feels like several lives at once: the university (with various changes in upper-level policy – an annoying time for British universities, as upper-level business savages try to extend control over non-business systems), my analysands (and another new one, and new chairs…
Paul Attinello 